“I feel like there’s two kinds of girls,” I say. “Those who love Audrey Hepburn and those who love Marilyn. Who do you love more?” Even as I ask, I know I am provoking her.

“I think that kind of gets to the core of a lot of things that I see in popular culture,” Clark says, frustrated. “It’s really destructive and doesn’t make any sense to me — the idea that if there’s an exalted female, there can be only one, and if there are more than one, then they must be in direct competition with each other.”

I didn’t mean to scrutinize the femaleness of her fame. I could’ve just as easily asked her, “Beatles or Stones?” But I struck a nerve, and I got to see firsthand how she recoiled at the idea of being dismissed — of being chalked up to something, or as something — when her talent and her ideas and her abilities, combined with the creative metabolism of a caffeinated prodigy, could make her something so much more than this or that.